PHOTOJOURNALIST WINS PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR AWARD FOR
AFGHANISTAN PICTURE 'THE VALLEY'

By Antoine du Rocher

PARIS, 28 JUNE 2008 - Hungarian photographer
Balazs Gardi has been named Photographer of the Year in the Px3
Prix de la Photographie, Paris 2008 and Human
Condition Competition. Mr. Gardi took first place in the
categories of Professional Photojournalism and General News for
his image The Valley in which an Afghan man holds a
wounded young boy in front of a house on 20 October
2007 in
Yaka China village, Kunar province, East Afghanistan. According
to the caption, the boy received several shrapnel wounds from a
rocket as a U.S. airstrike targeted a suspected insurgent
position in a nearby house the previous night. The air strike
also killed five other civilians and injured at least seven
villagers including children. This year's prize is worth 3.000
Euros.

On view until 28 June at the Acte 2 Galerie in Paris, the
winning work of varying quality by both professional (those who
earn, or have earned, the majority of their income from taking
photographs) and non-professional photographers is divided into
seven categories: Advertising, Photojournalism, Book, Book
Proposals, Fine Art, Nature and Portraiture. These are further
divided into such subcategories as General News, Wars, Feature
Story, Fashion, People, Architecture, Beauty, Sports, Annual
Reports, Food, Music, Nudes, Abstraction, Landscapes, and
Other.

Manifestly, there was no shortage of quality material from the
major war zones. In addition to Balazs Gardi's The
Valley, Bertrand Meunier's Where the Jihad Lives
Now series for Newsweek took second place in
General News. A provocative and at times seemingly manipulative
set of images shot in Pakistan, Meunier's photos could trigger
fear, if not outright Islamophobia, in the uninformed viewer.

Equally impressive is Brent Stirton's reportage by Getty Images
for Newsweek. Awarded third prize in Professional
Photojournalism and entitled Slaughter in the Jungle,
Mr. Stirton's shocking and heart-wrentching pictures document
the mysterious murders of mountain gorillas in Virunga National
Park in Eastern Congo in July 2007. According to the
caption, a silverback alpha male, the leader of a group, and
three females were shot and killed. Two of the females had
babies and the other was pregnant. The two babies were not
found and it is presumed they subsequently died of stress and
dehydration. The motivation for the killing is not known, but
it is suspected that there were political motivations. The
local illegal charcoal industry clashes with conservation
efforts in this very poor area and Rangers have been
threatened, tortured and killed as a result of this clash of
political and economic wills. Over 100 Rangers have lost their
lives in the efforts to protect the gorillas of Virunga, one of
the world's
most endangered species .

Presumably because of the robust market for such material, many
photographers seek out the horrors and cruelty of human
conflict and devastation (wars and war-related rape, genocide, floods, famine).
Gillian Laub won first prize in the Book category for portraits
of Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, displaced Lebanese families and
Palestinians. Among her most powerful images are those of
teenage boys without limbs and the matter-of-fact portrait of a
young woman enveloped in scar tissue and a burn-recovery suit,
with a framed reproduction of Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin's
Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer (Nude Youth
Sitting by the Sea) in the background.

Images exploring crime, ignorance, poverty, teen idols as sex
objects and racism in the United States have long been
monnaie courante, albeit exploitative terrain, as more
photographers made the transition from the documentary-style
photojournalism of the 1950s to the more personal and
investigative photographic explorations of the 1970s and 1980s.
Still, some capture the existential devastation better than
others. Italy's Nicola Majocchi won first prize in Professional
Political Photography for his series Wrongly Convicted
about an American who was accused of a crime he didn't commit,
was tortured for 12 hours until he signed a forged confession,
sentenced to death, spent 19 years in jail and then released.

One of the goals of the Paris competition is to introduce
photographers from around the world to the artistic community
of Paris - hardly a new idea, but a necessary mission in view
of the overwhelming predominance of western European and
American photographers in both commercial and fine art
photography. One hopes that such projects will improve
aesthetic literacy worldwide so that the average person may
appreciate and contemplate beauty in all its diversity, rather
than the sole aesthetic standards, traditions, prejudices and
deconstructions of western-European-descended white culture
(European painting, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, television,
digital culture).

That said, Indian photographer Jatin Kampani
from Mumbai won second place for Beauty. The
entre-deux-guerres sensibility that merges with the
staggerng millenia-old expression of beauty from the
subcontinent is a welcome change and long overdue in western
mass media.

Equally striking was Reimar Juul's Hijra: Neither man nor
woman, a series that documents the hijras of India. Hijras
are born as men, but dress as women. They have been recognized
as a third gender in the subcontinent from the earliest times.

Although some may consider photography a second rate means of
creative expression, it has, nonetheless, become one of the
most competitve within the art world, as art photography enters
important national and international collections and regularly
achieves top
prices at auctions . The relatively young German
photographers Andreas Gursky and
Thomas Struth are
notable examples. Advertising, which is highly lucrative but
equally as competitive, demands virtuosity as the prix
d'entrée .

In the non-professional Advertising category, the jury awarded
Los Angeles-based Ryan Schude First Category Winner, as well as
the more prestigious PX3 Best New Talent Award for his single
entry entitled, The Saturn.

Surprisingly though, categories such as performing arts, nudes,
family, music, abstraction among others were less felicitous or
simply derivative in their achievements. Despite the first
place of Howard Schatz for his Portraits of Actors in
black and white, or Elliott Erwitt's (Magnum)
second place for his series Adult Video Awards for
Newsweek , the category of Personality / People also
proved a challenge. Entertaining and fun, but no match for the
glamour and wit of Bettina
Rheims, Guy Bourdin,
or the celebrity portraits of
Annie Leibovitz among others.

The Human Condition Photography Competition, a seperate
contest, carrying cash prizes and promises of shows in New York
and Los Angeles, awarded first prize to Stephanie Sinclair for
The Bride Price, a series depicting child marriage in
Afghanistan.